Penny East, Survivor and Head of Communication, SafeLives
Penny is Head of Communication at SafeLives, a national domestic abuse charity. Penny was motivated to join SafeLives after experiencing an abusive and controlling relationship in her twenties. She now works to raise awareness of the issue but also the challenges faced by survivors in being heard, understood and supported. She works with the media on a regular basis, on survivor stories, data and the urgent need to change the public conversation around abuse.
Penny was a Fellow on the Clore Social Leadership Programme 2017 and specialised in gender equality. She is a keen writer and recently wrote about her experience for the New Statesman. Before joining SafeLives, she worked for charities such as Comic Relief.
Nathalie McDermott, Founder and Chief Executive, On Road Media
Nathalie is a former broadcast journalist, and worked at the BBC, Guardian and Media for Development where she set up the Prison Radio Outreach Project in Wandsworth Prison.
In 2008 she founded On Road Media, a charity that improves media coverage of communities that are misrepresented and misunderstood. They connect journalists with people with lived experience of social issues to inspire new storylines in soaps, TV dramas, factual and comedy, as well as improving news coverage. They support activists to do this work safely and with agency, including practising self-care, building confidence through peer support, and learning strategic communication techniques when choosing which parts of a personal story to tell, when and why for maximum impact.
Nathalie oversees Angles: A Different Take on Sexual and Domestic Abuse (New Radicals 2018 winner) and award-winning All About Trans, which have both leveraged over £6 million in positive British programming in the media.
Zing Tsjeng, UK Editor of Broadly at Vice Media
Zing Tsjeng is the UK editor of Broadly, VICE’s channel for millennial women. She has written about feminism, arts and culture, politics, race and LGBTQ identity for publications like the Guardian, Buzzfeed, Dazed, i-D magazine and The Debrief. Zing is also a presenter for VICE, and her most recent documentary (Britain First vs Antifascists vs Police) attracted 1.5 million views on Facebook.
She is a keen speaker and panelist, and has appeared on BBC Woman’s Hour and moderated live events at the BFI, SXSW, Web Summit and HowTheLightGetsIn festival. In 2017 she was nominated for the Pride Power List, which celebrates the achievements of influential lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Zing is the author of the feminist series, Forgotten Women, published by Octopus. Most recently Broadly's team launched the #UnfollowMe anti-stalking campaign in partnership with Paladin Charity highlighting the need to change our approach to stalking and update the law. Follow Zing on Twitter.
Chair: Dr. Sadie Wearing, Dept of Gender Studies
Sadie Wearing is Associate Professor in gender theory, culture and media at the LSE. Her research interests are in gender and cultural production and in feminist and gender theory, with a specific focus on aging, memory and temporality. She has published extensively on these themes in relation to both popular culture (film and television) and literature in both contemporary and historical contexts. She is the author with Niall Richardson of Gender in the Media (Palgrave, 2014) and the co –editor of The Sage Handbook of Feminist Theory (Sage, 2014). She is a member of the editorial collective for Feminist Review. Her current research project is a major AHRC grant supported collaboration with Lizzie Thynne (University of Sussex) and Yvonne Tasker (University of Leeds) on the British Filmmaker and Campaigner Jill Craigie.